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I’ve been on the Internet quite a while now, from USENET and IRC to twitter and google+. The one thing that I find striking is there is no guide for the Internet newbie on how to effectively argue.

First you start out with disagreeing with someone and be sure to be sarcastic. “How could you be so stupid to think that?” is a good line to use. If you get a polite response then be sure to come back with your rejoiner in all CAPS LIKE THIS. This demonstrates your opponent is stupid as obviously they can’t read.

If they persist in disagreeing with you, your next step is to wait for all your friends to call them stupid too. Extra points to each team if you can call them one of ‘Homophobe, Transphobe, Racist, Islamaphobe, or just plain MRA or SJW.’ Double your points if they have not demonstrated any of the above but they said something that could be construed that way. (You can do this easily by sticking to twitter to argue.) Remember, these are not people you would want to be friends with anyway so the more you can depersonalise these evil people the better.

If you are arguing on twitter, at this point you should be using a Hashtag e.g. #yourideaisstupid. Be sure to assume everyone using that hashtag is either completely for or completely against.

If they are still wrong at this point, now it is time to call into question their rationality or competence. Use google at this point and find out everything you can about at least one of your opponents then attack their competence in their profession. After all obviously they must be incompetent in something or they would not be wrong. Here’s some examples to use. If they are a female programmer, they are obviously incompetent as women can’t code. If they are a male school teacher, they are obviously homosexual.
Remember, old stereotypes about what men and women can do are useful weapons in your effort to destroy your opponent.

Don’t forget that phrases such as the one I just made above ‘women can’t code’ can be effectively turned into a verbal weapon so don’t forget to take phrases out of context.

Next step is to contact their employers. Someone so incompetent, is a nasty person and should be on the streets where they will be kept away from the Internet and you will win.

Sometimes this fails and this is time to find some hacker friends who agree with you so you can get them to DDoS the person that is wrong. Extra points here if they can claim they are with Anonymous. Double your points if each side DDoS’s and claims they are with Anonymous.

Your last resort is to get one of your hacker friends to SWAT your opponent. After all, they are evil and deserve to be accidentally killed.

Ignore the other side when they complain that your side is using this guide, after all you are the one that is completely 100% right about everything and the other side is absolutely wrong about everything.

I hope you find this guide useful!

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Our first television set was a RCA black and white with a tiny screen– modern colour TV was still years away from the 1950’s. We watched much early Disney and Ed Sullivan and Saturday morning there were the westerns my dad liked. The bad guys always wore black stetsons and the good guys always wore white.

One thing I have learned growing up is never to assume that there are only two sides to an argument. We are not watching old black and white cowboy westerns and people are not always 100% right or wrong. The best policy for me has been to take individual components of a side and examine each issue taken by one side or another as dispassionately as I can– I ask questions, I examine the evidence, I argue it out with others. Sometimes one or two points from one side seems right to me. with many other points seeming right to me from another side.

I can’t do group think for this reason. I reserve the right to express support for some grievance by any group without necessarily agreeing with everything this group says. Remember, any social group will use propaganda tactics whether it is consciously or unconsciously and critical thinking is the prime defense here. I also reserve the right to not be confined by association fallacies, in other words, I try hard to examine points of view without regards to who is saying it. “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day” goes the old adage. This does leave me in the position of sometimes being equally hated by those who do take sides. I am often asked to “Take a side!” or “ Make up your mind!”. Sorry. I just don’t do that.

I have said it before, sometimes I wish people would talk to each other, try to walk in other’s shoes instead of boiling everything down to black and white. People are not ‘isms. People hurt and they lash out. “I guess I’m just a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” (Lennon of course) All I ask of you is to argue in a civil manner without repeating the same boring argument to me and without bullying. I have a large tolerance for diverse points of view provided you aren’t a bigot or bully. There are also appropriate times to argue and, appropriate venues– I don’t really think twitter is one. Don’t be guilty of “Argumentum ad Twitterum”.

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When twitter first put their litle toy together, to me it seemed their idea was to build a simple electronic equivalent of an old fashioned office memo board. Why else would you limit it to 140 chars– taking advantage of a text message from a cell phone– and then provide limited means to limit who could read your tweets? Nevertheless many tweeters do extended tweets mimicking a real blog post, complain that people can read their posts and is therefore defective, and then to add insult to injury assume that anything crammed into 140 chars represents a complete nuanced thought.

The principle of charity is not one that most twitter readers utilise or even know about (http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html) and indeed it’s not only twitter that suffers from the lack of Principle of charity, but twitter with it’s brevity makes it very easy to ignore. It’s just too easy to take one tweet out of context and then cherry pick in order to make anyone look very bad.

Personally if your thing is to string tweets together to make a rant, I’m fine with it. I may ask for clarificaton and I may or may not agree in the end, but that’s what mature intelligent argument is about. I may learn something and you may learn something. I rarely argue on twitter because most argument quickly degenerate into name calling and the infamous “You are BLOCKED”. It sure is hard to change people’s minds by blocking and not arguing your point of view.

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When I was much younger I once voted for the Progressive Conservative party of Canada in a federal election and, this has shocked people who know me well. Would I vote for the modern Conservatives? Not at the present time. Does this mean I have changed my political views? Not necessarily as I have voted for different parties for different reasons throughout my life; either they are supporting an issue that I find important or, as Mark Twain reportedly said “Politicians are like diapers they both need changing regularly and for the same reason.”

In the same vein I don’t do labels in the same way as some others do. People are complicated, a tin of peas is not.

When someone has an identity they claim for themselves, I’m fine with that– but I am still going to want to know what your position is in detail. I have had friends hurt by people claiming the label MRA but I have had friends of mine hurt by people claiming the label feminist. What counts to me is not what you label yourself, but how you treat other people. Do you try to put yourself in other’s shoes? Are you willing to listen instead of only screaming? Do you try to negotiate a common position you both can agree to and work together on?

I’ve said I agree with a limited set of feminist ideals in a previous blog post. I also pointed out that these ideals appeared to me to be basic humanist ideals applied to women. There are positions that support men that I agree with, but these are humanist ideals. Here’s an analogy I hope clarifies my point. Somewhere there are two painters assigned to paint a building. One part of the building is to be painted white, the other part painted black. The painter painting the white walls is female and the black wall painter is male. A fight between the painters leaves a mess and the house will never get painted. The house is humanism. In reality of course we have a rainbow of colours for the house and lots of painters.

Mr. Clemens again “Look at the tyranny of party — at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty — a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes — and which turns voters into chattles, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master. – “ “The Character of Man,” Mark Twain’s Autobiography.

People love to form groups or tribes and these groups always end up with politics. I suspect the mindlessness of game theory and evolution explain this. Evolutionarily politics would enable group action which is sometimes constructive but often just plain stupid. I also suspect all of us have the primitive desire to be the alpha in our group and if not the alpha, to feel this power by proxy by showing dominance over other groups — like monkeys raiding other groups of monkeys. Our one concession to civilised behaviour is at least we don’t eat the other group.

“’When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’” — Lewis Carroll.

I see arguments all the time from various groups, one group tells me I should only be a humanist. If it makes you happy sure. One group tells me I am a egalitarian. They do love to cherry pick my tweets to support their position! Sure, why not? What is going on here is not that I am uncertain of my beliefs, I’m the master of them, what is going on is politics. I’ve seen some nasty arguments on twitter that reminded me of Canadian parliament. On my bad days I assume the worst, you don’t want to talk, you don’t want to understand each other, you don’t want to make this world a better place, you simply want to somehow control others. On my more charitable days I think you have been emotionally hurt and this blinds you to being human.

All I can do is sit back and sigh.

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I’ve stated my very narrow definition of feminism in “I’m still a feminist and so are you” and, it is the definition I use when referring to feminism. I cannot speak for anyone else’s use of the term feminism no more than a certain charlatan can claim to be a physicist– In other words when you have a grassroots term and there is no copyright on popular terms, the term becomes semantically diffuse. Does this means we should give up the term feminism and conclude it’s usefulness is over? This does seem a sensible solution at first glance until one realises that any term, unless backed by an organisation with a well defined statement of purpose, is also going to become useless. The solution I have chosen for myself is to define what exactly I mean by feminism and use the term accordingly. I readily admit that many people use the term feminist in other ways and, since I do not own the word I will reserve the right to disagree with their views.

Now as to the charge of “No true Scotsman”, anyone who has studied logical fallacies notes that the charge is only valid when a term is not rigidly defined and held to in the first place. The logical fallacy comes up because of the propensity of some groups to change a definition on the fly as to exclude people from a group when those people damage the reputation of a group. It is also an invalid charge it is admitted that some people who call themselves feminists using my definition are going to be nasty people, which I do. I also admit it is also possible all men with moustaches are evil since Hitler had a moustache. Logical fallacies are fun aren’t they?

I’m not a True Scotsman even though my last name is Bruce, because my family 7 generations or so back immigrated from Northern Ireland to Canada. I’m guessing they did so to get away from religious bigotry since the Robert Bruce that emigrated was married to a Mary Kennedy.

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Why are you reading any atheist blog for that matter? Yes for some of you, they were helpful for your deconversion, but why are you still reading them now? What is the point of continually reading one atheist blog and agreeing with everything said? You’ve come out of the dogma of religion only to take on the dogma of another person’s thoughts. Wasn’t the point of deconverting to learn to think, and evaluate evidence for yourself? I want to be challenged not pampered as religion does.

There is so much work to be done in our own communities, are you there helping with your local atheist groups? Are you active politically arguing for reason and science over nonsense?

Our local group has meet ups where I have met the most interesting people, and perhaps helped some come to grips with their family not accepting their atheism. I have met an active minister a member of the clergy project, trying hard to find other work, an atheist immigrant from Iran and several who have found reason and left evangelical lifestyles behind– they need our help and reading or even writing (!) a blog does not help them.

There is a reason the sub title of my blog is “Yet another atheist blog”. I don’t write to flame up controversy for the sake of followers– I write because I see things are not said. That said, I’ll concede more atheist blogs are good, if it translates into real action not keyboard warrior action,

So do you do anything in your local community?

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I don’t pay a lot of attention to a certain well known quack who argues that atoms are conscious. However, I ran into a philosopher who mistakenly believed the nonsense about consciousness being needed to cause a wave function to collapse.

Physicists have mathematical models describing what happens at the quantum level which make very good predictions, but these are models, and not reality. The wave function that is a solution to the Schrödinger equation describes the behaviour of particles at the quantum level, but what happens when we go to try and measure a particle? We have an interaction between the wave function that describes the particle, and the wave function that describes the particles of the measuring instrument. Why yes the observer affects the observation, but a brick wall would do just as well.